First Blood

I slowly opened my eyes, blinking the sunspots out of them.

{Notification}

New Quest: Savior

You heard the lad! Go save Luna from the clutches of those villains. This might even be a good chance to save yourself from some future headaches if you know what I'm saying ;)

Mission: Free Luna from the basement of the Malfoy Manor.

Reward: 100 SP, ???

~~~~~~

I was right, the system is rewarding me for personal accomplishments. A sigh of relief left my mouth, "Thanks goodness, now I don't have to worry about being controlled by a parasitic system. At least for now..."

"Slap!" My hand struck myself across the face, the pain clearing away the last vestiges of negativity from my mind.

"Fuck off negative thoughts! This is my life, not yours!"

Thinking about what I had just done, a red hue spread across my face. Ohhh, that was so embarrassing.

"My lord?"

I turned around slowly with my heart in my mouth as a feeling of dread overtook me. To my horror, it wasn't just Huan, my Skink commander, but his entire squadron as well, sitting on the train benches and gawking at me.

Fuck, this is humiliating. Quick me, think of something!

I adopted a scowl and gave them a disappointed look, "What are you looking at? This is a normal custom where I come from."

Huan shot back a skeptic look of his own, well as skeptical as a bipedal lizard can look, "My lord, we are imbued with your memories at our creation. There was nothing like that in our memories except during moments in fiction from your world that you would call 'cringy.'"

Damn, why did he have to be so smart.

"Well, neverminded that now. What of the search for a base? Did you find anything usable?"

Huan gave me a look that said that he knew what I was doing, but he relented and began to explain what his team found.

~1 Hour Later~

"Well... it's something"

"I'm sorry my lord, this is all we could find on such short notice."

I can't afford to be picky and considering the location, it's actually a sweet find. The "base" that my skinks found was a small warehouse that had fallen into disrepair due to neglect over the years. The floor was covered in debris and trash, no doubt left by homeless peoples looking for a place to escape the cold weather that plagued the British isles. The wall were sturdy at least, but the roof had seen better days and needed to be patched up ASAP.

You know what the best part was? The base was only a few minutes away from the Ministry of Magic. THE Ministry of Magic, the center of all magical power in Great Britain.

"I need to do something, while I'm gone, I need you guys to start repairing the building and cleaning up the mess."

"It will be done."

I stepped back out of the warehouse and onto the street, gulping down the acrid city air which was surprisingly enough, miles ahead of the smell of burnt rubber and feces.

"Hopefully it smells better when I get back."

I sauntered down the road using a new skill ability that I discovered on the way to the warehouse. By controlling the energy inside of me, I'm able to have a limited version of Foresight active at all times. Although it only lets me see a few seconds into the future, it's still sucking up quite a bit of my energy. By increasing the output, I can see further ahead, but the energy required starts to increase exponentially.

Once I neared my destination, I felt that my overpreparation might've been a little silly. Suddenly, I "saw" my future self being ragdolled into a wall by an explosion of orange energy.

Ducking down, I pivoted on my heels to behold the sight of an orange bolt of energy gliding over my head. Following the direction it came from, I saw a person wearing a black cloak that covered everything but their face, which was instead covered by a metal mask inlaid with complicated markings.

Their hand was outstretched, wielding an ornate black wand. Time seemed to unfreeze in that moment as they realized that their attack missed. Their wand charged up with a green hue this time as they prepared their next attack.

Fuck, it's definitely the killing curse, I have to avoid it at all costs.

I quickly stretched my hand out and started pushing a ton of energy into my hand. The death eater's spell released, the green bolt launched toward me at a high speed, but thanks to Foresight still being activated, I only had to slightly adjust my body to avoid it.

My spell was done charging, "Arcane Bolt."

Just before I shot off the spell, I slightly adjusted the course it would take. Let's just say that Foresight might be a little broken.

The death eater promptly turned to smoke and glided a few feet away with their wand pointed outward, prepared to fire off another spell. As they started waving their wand, my spell hit the wall directly behind the death eater, causing it to erupt in a shower of bricks and dust. One of those bricks slammed into the back of the death eater's head causing them to crumble to the ground, much like the wall behind them.

With my enemy down, I was able to catch my breath and calm my erratic heartbeat. I cautiously walked over to the death eater and raised my foot high in the air. With a jerking movement I slammed my foot down over the death eater's neck over and over in a haze of raging emotions.

I finally snapped out of it when I felt something wet on my foot. When I looked back down, I saw what could only be described as a "Fatality." Their neck was the exact definition of broken, the skin was bruised and torn with shards of fragmented bone jutting out in strange places. The blood leaking from the holes was what had knocked me out of my stupor.

I stared at my handiwork for an unknowable time until I stumbled back toward an alley and retched over and over, but nothing would come out. I sat down, leaned my back against the alley, trying to ignore the dirt on my clothes and closed my eyes.

Why? They were already knocked out and possibly sustained brain trauma, well that was nothing magic couldn't heal, but still, why did I kill them? Even knowing that they were a criminal who had probably killed and violated countless others didn't help. What if I hadn't killed them? They'd probably wake up eventually and wander back to Voldemort, content to continue their life of corruption and death.

They deserved to die, after all, they were human filth. Why did I think it would be so easy to kill. I knew the answer, but I didn't want to admit it. Movies, TV Shows, comics, anime. They all portrayed killing as a necessity and some people handled it better than others. Guess I was one of the "others." As much as I wanted to be one of the cold-blooded ones, I knew that just wasn't who I was. Besides, who wants to live a life of murder anyways? It's only supposed to be a means to an end, not the end all and be all of my existence.

I don't know if I want this to become easier over time, it might make me a callous man who doesn't care who he kills if it serves his M.O.

I know I have to kill, it will be unavoidable in the future, I just don't what it will do to me...

After staring at the wall in a daze for God knows how long, I stumbled to my feet and wandered back over to the body. Seeing the body triggered me again and I hunched over against the wall and retched some more. After a few minutes, I steeled myself and looked at the body again, this time I didn't become sick looking at it, that doesn't mean that I didn't feel sick.

I steadied myself, grabbing ahold of the body's foot and struggled to drag it into the alleyway. After about ten minutes of struggling to move 150+ lbs. of unresponsive flesh, I finally managed to move the unwieldy corpse out of sight.

Next, I searched their robes for anything that could be useful to me. Damn, has my life just been reduced to a looter-shooter? Seeing something still in the corpse's hand, I leaned closer and found their wand. As morbid as it was, I realized that I would have to pry it from their cold, dead hands.

I started with the thumb, then the pointer, middle, ring and finally the pinky. At last I had my hands on a wand, albeit one that probably wouldn't be the best fit, but nonetheless I had one.

I raised it up to my eyes and examined it closer, it was about 12 inches, made up of a dark hardwood and covered in intricate markings. I tried to channel my energy through it out of pure curiosity and I felt the wand fight back. It attacked my energy, as if the energy it was meant to handle was the exact opposite of mine.

Luckily my energy was too strong to be damaged by a wand, so it only felt like I was being tickled. I channeled my energy more aggressively this time and my energy rampaged throughout the wand, crushing any resistance that the wand tried to put up. After a few minutes, it seemed that I had gained control over it, although it seemed as if every time I wanted to use it, I would have to reestablish my dominance over it.

Well, that's a problem for future me. I went back to digging through the dead wizard's robes and I found a few things, well, only one thing if you count the mask and the wand as pre-looted. The other item was a small pouch, that when opened revealed quite a few gold coins, galleons I believe.

Looking back at the corpse, I smothered any guilt I still felt and strode off into the night.

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Wow that ending sounded pretty edgy, no? Hopefully Jason is on the right path or who knows what might happen.

This ended up being way longer than usual just because of the way the story flowed, it was meant to be released on Friday, but I was busy, so...

For reference, usual chapters are like 950-1100 words and this was about 1700.

Hit me up in the comments with any questions, I don't respond to everything, but I do see everything.